Over the last half
dozen years or so research has been revealing what the folks of Appalachia have
known for decades, that mountaintop removal is a bad thing. While previous
scientific studies of MTR have concentrated on specific environmental
impairments to streams or nearby ecosystems, a group of scientists have now
calculated the total environmental costs of mountaintop removal, and it’s as
ugly as any valley fill.
Using
satellite images and county-by-county records of coal production, the
scientists examined mountaintop mining from 1985 to 2005. Appalachian coal
produced during that 20-year period totaled 1.93 billion tons. That equals
about two years’ worth of current domestic coal demand. To mine that coal about
770 square miles were converted from mountains and forest to mountaintop mine
sites like the one pictured below.
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| Just one of the more than 500 mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia |
770 square miles is
the about the same area as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From the
paper’s abstract:
To meet current US coal demands, an area the size of Washington
DC would need to be mined every 81 days. A one-year supply of coal would result
in ~2,300 km of stream impairment and a loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration
capacity comparable to the global warming potential of >33,000 US homes. For
the first time, the environmental impacts of surface coal mining can be
directly scaled with coal production rates.
OK, if the enormity of
that doesn’t’ knock you out of your boots, the scientists have some other
numbers. One of the scientists who worked on this study, Emily S. Bernhardt,
says the carbon sequestration lost when forests are wiped out to make way for mountaintop mines is extremely long-term. The associate professor of
biogeochemistry at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment said:
“Based on the
average carbon sequestration potential of formerly forested mine sites that
have been reclaimed into predominantly grassland ecosystems, we calculate it
would take around 5,000 years for any given hectare of reclaimed mine land to
capture the same amount of carbon that is released when the coal extracted from
it is burned for energy.”
Brian D. Lutz, who
is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Kent State University and who began
the analysis for this study while he was a postdoctoral research associate at
Duke last year, adds that “Even on those rare former surface mines where forest
regrowth is achieved, it would still take about 2,150 years for the carbon
sequestration deficit to be erased.”
The
scientists found that great areas of the Appalachians were destroyed for
sometimes paltry amounts of coal. Their data suggests that some mines were
instigated to dig up coal seams that were only about one meter in thickness.
Including the valley fills and other adjacent disturbance to the land, they
calculated that the area disturbed by a mountaintop removal mine exceeds by 50
percent the spatial extent of the underlying coal.
Working
with Lutz and Bernhardt was William H. Schlesinger. He is a biochemist and
President of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies an independent
not-for-profit environmental research organization in Millbrook, New York. The
study was published today in the online peer reviewed journal PLOS ONE. No external funding financed the study.
